1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the presentation of electronic text and, more particularly, to the use of quote bars which can be activated to display information about the origin of the text and about its copyright status.
2. Description of Related Art
The digital transfer of information between individuals, whether by electronic mail, the World Wide Web, or other Internet services such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP), can easily lead to confusion about the original author of such material. The problem is especially acute when individuals use the cut and paste functionality of text editors to selectively copy portions of a second document into their own. Although one individual may be careful to give credit where credit is due, others may not. Even when explicit credit is given to the original author, such as in a footnote, it may be hard to discern that credit has been given while reading the document on a computer.
Electronic mail is one area where this problem is clearly demonstrable. When text from an earlier electronic mail message is copied by a user of current electronic mail systems, the fact that it has been copied is indicated to the recipient in one of three ways. Dashed lines above and below the quoted material, with an appropriate caption is one method. Another is to place greater than (“>”) sign at the left of each line of quoted text. Finally, some systems provide no automatic means to indicate quoted material, relying solely upon the user to insert a caption indicating the original source.
A problem encountered by recipients of electronic mail containing quoted material indicated by the dashed-line method noted above, when reading a quote that occupies more than one screen, is that the recipient often no longer is able to see the dotted lines due to the length of the quoted material.
Difficulties also exist with electronic mail that has used the greater than symbol (“>”) quotation method. If the recipient wishes to quote the material in a more standard way, by using quotation marks or indentation, he is faced with the task of removing each “>” from each line, a process that can be especially tedious if the text editor employed does not support global search and replace functions. Although the “>” method does provide a consistent way of quoting material and does reveal the source of the quotation it does so in a way that is clumsy and confusing.
Additionally, none of the quotation methods provide a way for the user to access the source of the original material. For example, a quotation taken from a document published on the World Wide Web may indicate the author and title of the document, but it rarely indicates the Universal Resource Locator (URL) that the user would need to view the source document.
The use of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and its subset Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is well known. The standards allow software enabled readers and browsers to format and display a document in the same way, regardless of the computing device being used. Standards such as SGML and HTML allow for device and operating system independence which is critical in the heterogeneous environment of the Internet. The use of SGML and HTML is widespread, well-understood and the standards are validated, maintained and extended by formally constituted bodies of individuals from government, industry and academia.
Readers and browsers are known which recognize a particular file format and activate the appropriate software module to view the file. This technology allows a single reader or browser to display a wide variety of files, such as graphic images, hypertext documents, and ASCII text, within the same user interface in a way that is transparent to the user.